According to a recent press release from Western Digital, the manufacturer agreed to purchase a startup in the flash memory market - Tegile Systems. The amount of the transaction is not disclosed. The parties intend to close the deal before September 4. Together with experts from Tegile Systems, Western Digital will receive unique developments for server storage systems and about 1,700 customers for the respective products. For example, just a week ago we talked about a new series of
rack storage systems Tegile IntelliFlash N on flash memory (SSD) with end-to-end support for the NVMe protocol. Demand for similar systems with advanced functionality and full orientation to solid state drives is steadily growing, which opens up a lot of new prospects for Western Digital.

It should be noted that Western Digital and SanDisk started investing in Tegile Systems in 2013, shortly after in 2010 Tegile appeared on the horizon of the market of hybrid storage systems. Even then, four years ago, Western Digital and SanDisk were named strategic partners of Tegile. Now, as we know, the first Tegile systems used custom-built SanDisk SSDs (the new Tegile systems use the conventional SSD standard form factor). As for Western Digital, it then directly stated that it will
work with Tegile to develop and promote hybrid storage systems on HDD and SSD. Today, as we understand (after the acquisition of SanDisk), Western Digital is more interested in promoting flash arrays.